Tag: Ira

Despite its vitriolic activities and protests that are political in nature, the hate group Westboro Baptist Church has somehow managed to keep its IRS tax-exempt status. But after its publicly announced plans to picket the funerals of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, tens of thousands of people have signed petitions hoping to change that.

A collection of radical left-wing groups opposed to British rule of Northern Ireland and critical of the political establishment, including the nationalist-focused Sinn Fein, have merged to reclaim the banner of the Irish Republican Army and are threatening violence against police.

The story of the Protestant "settlements" in Ireland provides a ghostly narrative of those modern-day "settlements" in the West Bank, where the Israelis insist on fighting the world’s last colonial war with the assistance of that great anti-colonial nation known as the United States.

Allowing that some Americans might find her “crazy,” Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing told Spain’s El Pais newspaper that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were “neither as terrible or as extraordinary as they think,” pointing to the IRA bombings in Britain as other examples of calamities.

The heads of Northern Ireland’s main Protestant and Catholic political parties have joined together in an historic power-sharing government. Ian Paisley, leader of an anti-Catholic church, and Martin McGuinness, formerly of the IRA, will lead the new government. Both men have spent time in prison for their extremist roles in the conflict.